[Request] Enhance Reputation
HeroicSpur
Member Posts: 907
Hi all,
I think reputation is an area of the game that needs to be looked at.
Why?: reputation rapidly becomes meaningless. It incurs a significant benefit, but as a good party, you can get max reputation very quickly, thereafter the stat in and of itself has little meaning beyond the bonuses it provides.
Changes? -At the least make reputation harder to gain. Or increase the max reputation but reduce the effect of each point of reputation (e.g. 30 rep having same effect or slightly more than 20 rep). This is because currently it is too easy and too quick to get to 20rep.
-Reputation needs to be changed to make evil parties more viable, but I wont go into that here because I want to keep this request non-controversial.
I think reputation is an area of the game that needs to be looked at.
Why?: reputation rapidly becomes meaningless. It incurs a significant benefit, but as a good party, you can get max reputation very quickly, thereafter the stat in and of itself has little meaning beyond the bonuses it provides.
Changes? -At the least make reputation harder to gain. Or increase the max reputation but reduce the effect of each point of reputation (e.g. 30 rep having same effect or slightly more than 20 rep). This is because currently it is too easy and too quick to get to 20rep.
-Reputation needs to be changed to make evil parties more viable, but I wont go into that here because I want to keep this request non-controversial.
7
Comments
It's too easy to reach the rank "Heroic" with many little quests. They should increase the difficulty to reach it
anyway, i'm really glad to see developers recognize the reputation system problem and i think virtue is a very good START to solve it.
what i liked was that it made reputation more a thing of fame, affecting the store prices and the like, and than you had virtue as inner motivation of the party that affects reaction of your comrades as well as actively influencing main characters good/evil alignment.
that way, roleplay was also more flexible (passively) in terms of lawful/chaotic parameters, instead of simply making it a good/evil issue. i wonder however if it would make sense for reputation to influence lawful/chaotic scale, as inner motivation influences good/evil?
i already see many non-realistic issues coming from this, but lawful and chaotic hardly have any impact in general on the gameplay as they are harder to implement and would demand separate "virtue" scale. it would be nice not to have lawful=good and evil=chaotic, but then again any non-obvious moral choice is very hard to define. let alone implement and code.
virtue-style will be fine i guess
"We've had a few discussions on the reputation system. We'll likely look at reputation post-ship"
"Yo," says the oak tree. "You the guy who helped the dryad? Yeah, I went and told the shopkeeps to lower their prices for you..."
It's a great idea to have such a system, but it wasn't exactly implemented with a lot of foresight to call it "reputation" and make it work the way it does. But I admit it makes sense that merchants in Baldur's Gate City know how I rescued a dead kitten and want to cut me a break. My rep got a boost from the dead kitten fully half what I got by rescuing a throng of starving miners. That was some feline corpse, lemme tell ya.
The problem is that the current system integrates karma/morality into reputation and flits between them at different times, arbitrarily (as well as the more practical problem which the request proper seeks to deal with). I agree that implementing another arbitrary system in its place doesn't help anyone.
Insofar as dealing with that arbitrariness, it's up to Overhaul to exercise their discretion and add virtue raising/decreasing encounters where they feel appropriate, or adjust reputation awarding events to provide virtue.
Another problem which has to be dealt with is, what exactly will be the benefit/penalty of virtue be? There has to be some, otherwise players would happily wonder about with 0 virtue because it doesn't have any ramifications.
The final note is that if Overhaul don't have the time and resources to enhance the whole system, then simply making the current system more challenging to yield the substantial reward it nets, should be the priority.
Yeah, some of the evil NPCs might like it, but I doubt that Edwin or Xzar would be happy with it.
Anyway, I'm sorry I resurrected the thread. I've played Baldur's Gate for a long time, and you'd think I know of this Virtue mod. I found out just now...and judging by the description, I think it's a good alteration to the flawed system. I wish it gets its way to the BGEE, or at least something like it. And by "post-ship", you mean it would come as a DLC?